Can working women have it all?

I don't think these discussions will ever end in any agreement that women can or should have it all. Personally I think wanting it all is a bit greedy and I didn't work outside the home until all my four children were at school.

But I think it is worth stressing that childminders and nursery staff are very poorly paid indeed (e.g. twelve pounds per hour for qualified staff working at an exclusive North London nursery).

More and more women want to leave their children in the care of others so isn't it time that the carers were properly rewarded for doing the most important job in the world?

£12 an hour seems pretty high, even for London, Grossi! I certainly wouldn't call it very poorly paid.

Ana where I live in Cheshire, cleaners get £10 an hour!

Yes, but presumably we're talking full-time for the nursery staff. Cleaners usually work limited hours, and people are willing to pay that much for their services.

The more nursery staff are paid, the more the nursery will have to charge parents, so someone is always going to lose out.

At the nursery I mentioned, the staff are not full-time. They are paid by the hour (and are therefore not paid during the school holidays).

They have also had to spend at least one year becoming qualified as early years teachers.

And they look after other people's precious children. I have no doubt that cleaners work hard, but their jobs surely carry less responsibility.

Sorry, Grossi, I'm a bit confused here - is it a nursery school you're talking about? In which case, the pay scale would obviously be different from that of a day nursery, and it is a day nursery that most parents use to look after their children while they go to work. They don't close for school holidays!

I personally think that cleaners also have responsibility [think what you can pick up if a communal area is dirty!] but it's a different type of responsibility.

Having been a working woman once the children were at school I don't think working women can have it all - and shouldn't expect to have it all! It's a choice, forced for some and freely made by others, and like many choices it comes at a price.

It seems that these days people expect to have it all - straight away: young people expect to have a beautifully furnished home straight away; school leavers expect to fall into the highest paid job in the world straight away; those who aim for stardom expect that TV auditions result in 'celebrity' straight away. And if these things don't happen then the sky falls down and the rest of us [us being society] have to pick up the pieces. I am exaggerating to some extent but its todays have-it-all culture that really gets my goat.

Yes, gg, you are exaggerating. Most - if not all - young people are far more level headed than these generalisations would have us believe. My senior GD has never been without a part-time job since she turned 13 and became a paper girl. She has now become a very shrewd shopper and is working hard to get a decent degree. Most of her friends either have jobs or are also at university trying to ensure a good future for themselves - and good luck to them in the present economic climate.

All of my four children had jobs from the age of 13, and continued to work whilst at college and university, as did their friends. I do think they expect to have more material possessions than when I first lived independently, but they have worked longer hours than I did then. Two of my children (30+) have two jobs, one being back at uni doing a psychiatric nursing degree, and working on NHS bank, whilst working as an artist to supplement his income and pay off his first student loan. He has just had his first free weekend in 7 months, as uni has finished for summer and he can relax and just do a 48 hour week!

But there is a lot of truth in what goldengirl says and I agree that working women never did and can't expect to have it all. In fact I think it was probably our generation of women that started to believe we could have it all and this generation that is paying the price. I think they are suffering the double whammy of even higher expectations (instant gratification, celebrity culture etc) coupled with the impossibility of ever fulfilling them due to the much harder times in which they live.

Teachers in schools have to have degrees, nursery based workers do not. The whole Early Years staffing /careers is a mess! This is because it will cost too much to have a top quality workforce as they do in most Scandanavian countries. (pedagogiques)
There are many extremely good early years workers in day nurseries but sorry to say there are also many who have very limited skills for working with babies and toddlers and no incentive for them to improve their knowledge as pay is so awful! Also in some day care settings the owners are not keen to pay above basic wage as margins of profit need to be kept up! My daughter a qualified and experienced teacher is paid £7:50 an hour to work in the private nursery locally. She has chosen to do this as it fits with her needs at the moment but that is not a great rate of pay when you think of what nurseries are expected to do and the responsibility they have to support the development of young children.

As a country we do not value infancy and childhood enough to invest in high quality provision!

My son is (mostly) a house-husband, as they say 'over there' in America. He is married to a young woman who loves her job and would not be content to be a 'stay-at-home-mom'. She is able to work flexi-time, so arrives at work very early in the morning and is back by about 4pm, when my sons hands over the reigns and goes off to do a shift in the local DIY store, or to college, where he is studying Politics. At the weekends, he works, and she stays at home. The state provides free morning specialist care for their autistic son, and their daughter is just over 2 yrs. old. They own a house which needs loads of renovation. Do they think they 'have it all'? I don't know because I've never asked them, but they are a very happy family, if somewhat chaotic .

'Having it all' is very subjective, isn't it.

Agree butternut being content would be my idea of 'having it all' and that varies from person to person!

Some people are happy at home with kids some find it frustrating, some have choice others do not. There are those who do juggle a career and family very well and others who find that too tricky.

It should not be a competition between women. The trouble is society values those who make money more than those who nurture lives. Both are equally necessary but we value them differently!

No one can "have it all". You have what you choose to have – and work for tha

A lot of younger women think they can ! I blame that germaine Greer !!!! she certainly doesn"t do it for me , or ever did [cheesy grin]

Well I do think that Germaine Greer and that generation of influential feminists said a lot of things that needed to be said - things that we now take for granted (about rights that our daughters think we always had). However, she was not a parent and in fact I think at the time women were fighting for such basic rights - such as equal pay, employment rights, the right to have a mortgage - that the needs of children and conflicting roles of mother/ worker did not get a look in. I think that as the basic rights were won (to a large extent - but still not completely) then the needs of children started to be considered. It is an ever evolving process, hence the recent trend by some wealthy middle class women to turn themselves into self-styled 1950s housewives with no sense of irony or apparent awareness that home was a prison for many of these women. Of course, poorer women have always worked and cobbled together child care arrangements with the help of family and friends. They didn't have time to wonder whether they could have it all.

I have been reading a book about women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author points out that most people lived off the land and women worked full time in agriculture whether larger scale or small-holding. Old women and older children (until they started work on the land) looked after the infants. The rich folk farmed their children out and often didn't take them into the household until they were three or older. In the nineteeth century many women worked in factories.
As I said earlier, the "stay-at-home Mum" is largely a twentieth century, middle-class construct. I think the vast majority of poorer people and the rich have never looked after their own children full-time.
I have yet to see any real evidence that staying at home with small children has any real impact on their long-tern development.
Good parenting and good childcare make all the difference in the world; no single methodology has a monopoly on this.

Suppose it depends on whether one wants to be at home with children , I was able to do that and many other women did , didn"t really occur to do anything else . Thats the way it was !! certainly filled my tubes !!! [suynshine]

I am quite certain that my 2 grandsons have not been adversly affected by attending nursery since quite small babies. But my daughter - a genetic engineer -looks absolutely exhausted at times. I think it is largely to do with trying to juggle loads of balls at once. Her job is very presurred at times and when she gets home there is all the stuff that the boys are involved in and this involves taxi-ing etc.
I was a stay at home Mum which I didn't mind at all but it certainly was done at the expense of my career, this means that I have lost out on potential earnings as well as a reasonable pension. But what you have never had......

Old saying , whitewave , different strokes for different folks , each generation has their own slant on it [sunshine]

I feel we should pay much much more for day care for both our very young and our very old. the carers should be extremely well qualified-not necessarily paper qualifications but well trained and I am sure there could be some sort of psychosometric tests constructed to cover those p[eople who are innate nurturers rather than those who can only get a job in caring.(is that the right word psychosometric?)

I have been reading this thread with interest and agree with much of what has been said - on both sides of the argument. It seems to me that all (or certainly most) mums and dads do what they think is best for their children. Whatever their choice - be it nursery care or stay at home parent - they tend to be defensive of it - rightly because they think they are doing the right thing. Why can't we just accept that people make different choices from the best motives and not criticize them for these choices. I must say that I do agree that many young mums and dad look exhausted from holding down jobs, keeping their homes organised, washing done etc. However, it is their choice and as grandparents we try to support them whatever choice they make.

I agree with you wisewoman - although in some cases there really is no choice. My own DD, for example, did not foresee that she would split up from her partner and become a single mother of two struggling to pay the mortgage etc. It really isn't an option for her to give up work and claim benefits (not that she would want to) as eventually the house would have to be sold and she would be back to square one.

nonu I absolutely encourage and support my son and daughter in all their decisions but it doesn't stop me worrying about them when they don't look up to scratch.

When I stopped work to have #1 child in 1977 the London social services I worked for were increasingly influenced by the militant tendency. To say you wanted to leave work to bring up children seemed to be condemned as dealing a blow aginst female emancipation and the revolutionary cause! One such female with a young child noted that she felt she needed to get back to work as she was becoming too "wrapped up in her child" (some people just call that bonding.) To say that you need to get back to work to further your career to pay the mortgage is one thing, to do it because you feel you are getting too close to your child worries me. I certainly was left to feel that looking after your own Child was not valued.

I loved being at home with my young children even as babies. Watching them grow up and develop was wonderful. Most women of my age then did stop work. I started working part time again when they were 5 and 3.
We were lucky enough to have a choice. At that time house prices were such that we could actually afford our mortgage on one salary, that would not be possible in that area now. Most mums now have to work to pay bills and do not have a choice.